Battlefield

The British Army has taken ownership of its first Terrier combat engineer vehicle, which maker BAE Systems claims is the most advanced of its type. The armored vehicle has been described as a Swiss Army Knife for the battlefield, capable of clearing routes or creating cover. Perhaps most significantly, the Terrier is drive-by-wire, and can be controlled remotely with a device very much like a console game pad.
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The spleen’s job is to filter our blood. When people are critically ill or have received traumatic injuries, however, the spleen alone is sometimes not able to remove enough of the pathogens on its own – potentially-fatal sepsis is the result. In order to help avert such an outcome in those situations, scientists from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University are developing a device known as the spleen-on-a-chip.
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DARPA recently revealed information on its ARGUS-IS (Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System), a surveillance camera that uses hundreds of smartphone image sensors to record a 1.8 gigapixel image. Designed for use in an unmanned drone (probably an MQ-1 Predator), from an altitude of 20,000 ft (6,100 m) ARGUS can keep a real-time video eye on an area 4.5 miles (7.2 km) across down to a resolution of about six inches (15 cm).
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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing a foam that can be injected into the body cavities of battlefield wounded to protect them from internal abdominal bleeding. The agency hopes that when perfected, this polyurethane polymer foam will help the wounded to survive the critical minutes needed to transport them to proper surgical facilities for treatment.
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The humble controller has never been the best choice for first-person shooters. Those who have mastered the keyboard and mouse combo can pulverize even the best console gamers thanks to the added accuracy and speed of movement that control method provides. But while this combination may be the method of choice for serious FPS gamers, it doesn't offer any kind of realism. Something that the newly announced Delta Six controller cannot be accused of thanks to its firearm form factor.
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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is extending the testing of its Blast Gauge that measures the abrupt pressure and acceleration changes a soldier is exposed to in the event of a exposure to a blast. These external forces can result in traumatic brain injury (TBI), an often invisible injury that can cause a host of physical, cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral effects. DARPA’s Blast Gauge is designed to provide medics with quantitative data to better identify those at risk of TBI so as to provide better treatment.
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Lockheed Martin's new Shadow Hawk weapon is deceptively small considering the influence it will likely have on warfare from this point forward. The era of unmanned warfare is about to go to a whole new level. The Shadow Hawk is an 11-pound class, 2.75-inch (7 cm) diameter, 27-inch (68 cm) long drop-glide munition released a mile or more above the target by the equally diminutive unmanned RQ-7B. It may not seem like a major leap forward in weapons technology but it most certainly is, because the Shadow Hawk munition now arms an entire fleet of RQ-7s for the US Marines and Army that could previously only be used for reconnaissance, and it does so with a much smaller and cheaper weapon.
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Warco - The News Game is an FPS-style game in development where the player takes on the role of a war correspondent tasked with collecting video from the battlefield. Instead of the standard bloody clashes with enemy forces, the game challenges the player to dodge bullets and capture attractive footage. Warco is the brainchild of Australian war correspondent Tony Maniaty and filmmaker Robert Connolly, who teamed up with games studio Defiant Development.
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For U.S. troops, the most common type of battlefield fatality involves blood loss due to trauma. When a soldier does experience blood loss, their chance of survival drops by 22.5 percent once hypothermia sets in. Needless to say, if that reaction can be minimized or delayed, then less fatalities should occur. A team of biomedical engineering students from New Jersey’s Stevens Institute of Technology is working towards that goal, by developing a blood-warming system device known as Heat Wave.
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Firing a rifle at a Longbow Apache Attack helicopter in the hope of claiming a US$8 million scalp with a 50 cent bullet might not be a very good idea for too much longer - unless you like keeping company with a Hellfire missile. The U.S. Army’s Longbow Apache Attack helicopters are about to gain a networked Ground Fire Acquisition System (GFAS) which uses infrared cameras to detect muzzle flashes from ground fire, and displays the location and distance of the shooters as an icon on the pilot’s display screen. Not only does this enable the immediate acquisition and prosecution of targets, it also offers the same information to ground forces via the net-centric battlefield information system, giving everyone in the fight vastly improved situational awareness.
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